John Foreman, Data Scientist
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Reach vs. Motivation and the Hacker News Bump

2/23/2014

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At the beginning of November, my data science book came out from Wiley. The book seems to have been useful to some folks, and that's about the best one can hope for from a technical book.

Now, the thing about publishing a technical book is that even though the publisher can get the book to the shelves, it's still up to the author to do a lot of their own marketing. The publisher ain't going to push this thing like a new Games of Thrones book (not that that'd need advertising...or that that's going to happen at this rate. Anyway...).


It's probably fair to say that most technical authors are not great marketers. It's a tough job, because unless you're writing on a very niche subject, there are probably a few competing titles for a limited number of eyeballs. How do you get people to pay attention to your book?

Well, for me I did plenty of the basic stuff -- things like tweeting about the book a lot much to the annoyance of my closest Twitter pals. But today I want to talk about the three things that I've done only on a semi-regular basis:

1. Write blog posts 
2. Do interviews that are posted online
3. Speak at conferences

And since the book came out, some of my interviews and blog posts have made it to the front page of Hacker News. So pairing up when all these posts went up and when I spoke with my sales data from BookScan, I was able to get a sense of which of these activities gives me the best bang for my buck.

Now, I hoped the most effective activity would be blog posts. Why? Because I like writing, and I don't have to leave my bedroom to do it. Interviews are cool too, but while they don't require travel, they do require me talking about myself, which is nauseating. 

As for speaking, it's is a lot of fun, but as a father of three, I don't like being on the road all the time and I keep wondering whether speaking is all that great since you don't have the internet as your bullhorn. You can only sell your book to a few people in the room. It's got limited reach.


So, here's a line chart of my sales numbers (I erased the y-axis but it does start at 0) for all the weeks since the book was released. I've noted important events on the graph. Let's dig in.

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Data Privacy, Machine Learning, and the Destruction of Mysterious Humanity

2/22/2014

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Recently, I wrote an article about Disney’s new RFID location and transaction tracking technology, the MagicBand. Perhaps more magical for Walt than it is for you, the band allows Disney to track their customers’ actions inside their parks (and possibly outside). Where you walk, what you eat, when you stop to borderline-abusively yell at your kids. All that magic gets tracked.

This personal data is then used to deliver individually customized experiences to park-goers, and as a by-product, Disney gets to do all sorts of analysis on the data to figure out how to squeeze you for all you’re worth.

My personal tale with the MagicBands is one of pirates. My kids rode Pirates of the Caribbean all day, so when they saw Mickey, he talked not about Buzz or about Peter Pan but about Jack Sparrow. Bam! Big data in action. Mickey knows.

This kind of tracking is unnerving for some. Indeed, one of my post’s readers called me an asshole for so flippantly discussing the topic. 


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A follow-up conversation with GigaOM on my Disney post

2/21/2014

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A few weeks ago I wrote a piece on Disney's MagicBand technology. I then actually went to Disney, and my kid puked. So the only thing to do was a podcast about that with GigaOM. This podcast actually fleshes out how Disney used their tracking data on my own family (hint: it involved Jack Sparrow).

Podcast here.

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You don’t want your privacy: Disney and the meat space data race

2/20/2014

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Reprinted here from my original post over at GigaOM.

When my wife and I went backpacking around Europe 10 years ago, we made a vow to each other. After seeing the stunningly blue waters off Greece, the paragliders sailing through the Austrian Alps, the idyllic countryside of Slovenia, we said, “Never will we take our children to Disney World. Why would you need something so manufactured when you have the real world?”

It’s 10 years later. And I left for Disney World on Thursday. The thing I didn’t understand, which, now that I have three boys, I know in my bones is this: You can’t see Buzz Lightyear while backpacking.

Oh well, Walt! You win.


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    Author

    Hey, I'm John, the data scientist at MailChimp.com.

    This blog is where I put thoughts about doing data science as a profession and the state of the "analytics industry" in general.

    Want to get even dirtier with data? Check out my blog "Analytics Made Skeezy", where math meets meth as fictional drug dealers get schooled in data science.

    Reach out to me on Twitter at @John4man

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